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New tools for building agents

openai.com

91–100 of 165 posts

Re: New tools for building agents

#91
post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

I just use OpenAI to help me build these "necessary" patterns against their own API. Why make me use some framework when the AI is the framework?

Re: New tools for building agents

#92
post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

100%. I'll build the application, thanks.

But you can't expect them not to try.

Re: New tools for building agents

#93
post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

This bit feels like we are being pushed away from the existing API for non-technical reasons?

> When using Chat Completions, the model always retrieves information from the web before responding to your query. To use web_search_preview as a tool that models like gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini invoke only when necessary, switch to using the Responses API.

Porting over to the new Responses API is non-trivial, and we already have history, RAG and other things an assistant needs already.

Re: New tools for building agents

#94
post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

I get the sense that these sorts of tools are more for power users than for software engineers with production AI experience.

Re: New tools for building agents

#95
post #82

I feel like all those AI agent attempts are misguided at their core because they don't attempt to create new ways but replace humans on the legacy systems. This is fundamentally shortsighted because the economy, life and everything is about humans interacting with humans. The current AI agent approach appears to be permutations of the joke about how people will make AI to expand their once sentence to a long nice e-m…

I think the most valuable path for the current generation of AI models is integrating them with the configuration and administration side of the product.

For example, as a supplemental user experience that power users in your org can leverage to macro out client configuration and project management tasks in a B2B SaaS ecosystem. Tool use can be very reliable when you have a well constrained set of abstractions, contexts and users to work with.

Re: New tools for building agents

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not implementing doesn't mean its not supported https://github.com/dylibso/mcpx-openai-node (this is for mcp.run tool calling with OpenAI models, not generic) but yes, it's the strongest anti-developer move to not directly support MCP. not surprised given OpenAI generally. but would be a very nice addition!

DeepSeek doesn’t seem to support it either FWIW. Maybe MCP is just an Anthropic thing.

It is not only an Anthropic thing, and it works with any model that supports function calling, which DeepSeek did not when it first launched. That probably has changed since, but I haven't looked!

Re: New tools for building agents

#98
post #65

There's a really good thread on Twitter from the designer of the new APIs going into the background behind many of the design decisions: https://twitter.com/athyuttamre/status/1899541471532867821 Here's the alternative link for people who aren't signed in to Twitter: https://nitter.net/athyuttamre/status/1899541471532867821

The nitter link is appreciated!

TIL about Nitter, so grateful as I have Twitter blocked on my computer and phone.

Re: New tools for building agents

#99

$25 per thousand searches seems excessive

ya i'm sure they'll get a bunch of usage despite that but don't know who would use it at any kind of scale with that pricing

otoh, they've dropped prices for everything else a ton previously so maybe they will for this as well

Re: New tools for building agents

#100
post #8

They did not announce the price(s) in the presentation. Likely because they know it is going to be very expensive: Web Search [0] * $30 and $25 per 1K queries for GPT‑4o search and 4o-mini search. File search [1] * $2.50 per 1K queries and file storage at $0.10/GB/day * First 1GB is free. Computer use tool (computer-use-preview model) [2] * $3 per 1M input tokens and $12/1M output tokens. [0] https://platform.openai.…

Those prices, especially for web search, are absurd.

I have a hard time seeing how this API is better than https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol.

It seems like the motivation was "how can we make more money", rather than "how can we be more useful for our users".

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